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Re: Mixed Tenses in One Sentence

The results of the study led the researchers to conclude that the type of treatment administered is suitable for the group.

The researchers did a study on, say, 'can you successfully treat mentally ill people who are also of very low intelligence with X form of psychological treatment' or are people of lower intellectual capacity unable to derive any benefit from the treatment and so it is a waste of time trying.

Now, treatment itself might take months or even years of sessions. But surely we don't need to wait until the end of the treatment to find out whether it is possible to do this treatment successfully with this group? Surely, there must be signs early on, that the treatment is working, is having some effect, that they are making some progress, that symptoms are being relieved?

So, they do a study. They start treatment, and after a month, they compare the severity of the symptoms then with how bad they were at the start. If there has been some significant improvement, they know that the therapy, the treatment, isn't a total waste of time. Just how successful the treatment will eventually be - a complete cure? - they won't know till the end of the psychological treatment. BUT :The results of the study after just one month have led the researchers to conclude that the type of psychological treatment being administered is suitable for this group of people and so it is not a waste of time for the group to continue treatment to completion of the therapy.

Re: Mixed Tenses in One Sentence

Ex: The results of the study led researchers toconclude that the type of treatment administered is/was suitable for the group.

is = present factwas = past fact; was at the time, but is no longer now

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One convention in academic writing that often gives students difficulty is what tense to use when discussing a text. One's first inclination is probably to use the past tense when discussing a book written in the past. But that's not what is usually done. Most textual analysis and commentary is written in the present tense, a convention sometimes called thehistorical present: Read more here http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/rhetoric.html#present

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[The historical present] is particularly common with 'verbs of communication' such as tell, write, and say (and in colloquial uses, go) (Leech 2002: 7).

Literary critics and grammarians have said that the historical present has the effect of making past events more vivid. More recently, analysts of its use in conversation have argued that it functions, not by making an event present, but by marking segments of a narrative, foregrounding events (that is, signalling that one event is particularly important, relevant to others) and marking a shift to evaluation (Brinton 1992: 221).

Re: Mixed Tenses in One Sentence

Ex: The results of the study led researchers toconclude that the type of treatment administered is/was suitable for the group.

is = present factwas = past fact; was at the time, but is no longer now

_______________________________

One convention in academic writing that often gives students difficulty is what tense to use when discussing a text. One's first inclination is probably to use the past tense when discussing a book written in the past. But that's not what is usually done. Most textual analysis and commentary is written in the present tense, a convention sometimes called thehistorical present: Read more here http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/rhetoric.html#present

________________________________________

[The historical present] is particularly common with 'verbs of communication' such as tell, write, and say (and in colloquial uses, go) (Leech 2002: 7).

Literary critics and grammarians have said that the historical present has the effect of making past events more vivid. More recently, analysts of its use in conversation have argued that it functions, not by making an event present, but by marking segments of a narrative, foregrounding events (that is, signalling that one event is particularly important, relevant to others) and marking a shift to evaluation (Brinton 1992: 221).

I agree with you that historical present is used for making past events more vivid. But in this context (The initial thread) I don't think present tense is correct. It should be phrased as "........ have led the researchers to conclude that the type of treatment administered is suitable for the group"